Drowsiness detection systems become more and more popular and established in today's cars, especially in cars sold by so-called premium-brands.
Those systems directed to monitor and control the driver's fitness and, for example, alarm the driver in the case of lack of fitness are normally still very expensive and even in the aforementioned premium-brands often only available as additional expensive premium packages.
The working principle of these known systems is to monitor the driver with regard to such aspects as steering wheel control, lane deviation etc. If, while monitoring those aspects, the system detects patterns that indicate drowsiness the driver is informed of this fact, either via sound or the car's information display in the dashboard, for example.
For the control of lane deviation, known systems are based on cameras that control the road markings and the car's position with respect to those road markings. If the car leaves the lane between those road markings without any apparent reason, for example, an intended switch of lanes indicated by the turn indicator, the system warns the driver accordingly.
Since those systems are based on the processing of the continuous image data delivered by the camera to the system, the system itself has to be equipped with resource demanding video processing algorithms. Due to the high demand on those resources, like computing power and memory, the system gets very expensive and/or is inaccurate or unreliable in many situations, especially during nighttime when drowsiness detection is most relevant.
Monitoring the steering wheel control is realized in the available systems by accessing the car's subsystems in order to get the steering wheel actuation information. Such a drowsiness detection system therefore needs to be completely embedded in the car's electronic systems in order to function properly. Accordingly, those systems, as well as the aforementioned video based systems, have to be included at the time of ordering the car into its electronic systems and into the whole vehicle.